The ability and need to distinguish and expand products and service offerings continue to be a driving force of today's economy. Solutions to provide add-ons, additional revenue streams, marketing, and inventory management are a constant challenge to various companies. Businesses continue to look for ways to improve their margins through minimized costs without adversely affecting their sales or product offerings. Intrinsic to these environments is how to better utilize existing mediums or products and leverage technologies or other services to facilitate such solutions. For example, a photographer, company or individual that may be responsible for developing or creating content or other artwork may need to expand revenue by looking beyond just selling photographs of the artwork. Such an entity might look to offer such content or artwork on some specific product lines such as books, brochures, key chains, mugs, t-shirts, calendars and the like.
In these instances, the content owner may be limited in a number of ways. In the first place, the content owner would have to set up or at least engage in a new business venture that will handle ordering the products on which the artwork would be displayed, imprinting or otherwise incorporating the artwork on the products, maintaining an inventory of finished and unfinished products, processing sales orders, and distributing the finished products to end customers.
Currently, such distribution of products is accomplished using the Internet. In the described scenario, the content provider would need a website that is set up for order taking and processing, as well as a back office system or model for providing shipping and/or product delivery. Such an endeavor can be both costly and time consuming for the content provider, thereby diminishing the likelihood of engaging in such an endeavor. More importantly, such an endeavor may distract the content provider from its core business or interests.
To address this need and overcome some of the shortcomings described earlier, some systems have been implemented in the marketplace to allow a content provider to partner with a product company. One such system is provided by Zazzle.com Inc. of Redwood City, Calif. (www.zazzle.com). In such an arrangement, the content provider provides the product company with artwork content to enable customers to order content emblazoned products. However, such an arrangement limits the exposure for the content provider because the artwork content is only being displayed and marketed through a single product outlet. The content provider is limited to the single site of the product company or those of the product company affiliates.
Another system may allow the content provider to provide a link on a product company's website to enable customers to order content emblazoned products. However, such a system may be limited in the sense that the product company may not have the capability or desire to be engaged in the processing of payments or fulfillment of orders on a retail basis on behalf of the content provider. The foregoing problem may be addressed by allowing a third party processor company to process or fulfill orders for finished products, when a link is provided on that third party processor's website. The problem with this option is that the content provider is still limited to a single outlet for his finished products. In other words, these solutions still present some major disadvantages and suffer from a number of limitations. Importantly, the content provider is limited in the placement of its links to just the website of the product company and/or website of the third party processor, which results in limited exposure for the content provider. Furthermore, content providers may be faced with the requirement of meeting certain minimum order quantities from the product manufacturer, or worse yet, be required to maintain a product inventory. Even further, the use of a third party for processing/fulfilling orders creates another middle man that has to be compensated and is potentially a bottle neck in product flow, or is at least another entity with whom the content provider must interact.
There exists a need to eliminate the requirement that the content provider maintain an inventory. Even further, there exists a need to provide the content provider with a solution that will facilitate the broadest possible exposure for the finished product through placement of links on a plurality of disparate or similar websites. Further still, there exists a need to minimize the bookkeeping and order tracking that would be involved for the content provider.
What is needed in one aspect is an enhanced product linking capability that will enable a content provider to offer products that incorporate its content on any chosen website. In another aspect, a system and method that provides orderings and fulfillment for multiple products to a multitude of sites is needed. There is currently no efficient technique for individualized content provider products to be advertised and purchased from a multitude of websites, social networks or other similar forums.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient, scalable, user friendly and robust technique to provide product links that can be placed on multiple sites, wherein the product links direct a customer to a canvas product center/fulfillment center to obtain customized products that may have a variety of content from content providers. The present invention fills these needs as well as other needs.